This is Swipe, a blog by pinch/zoom about mobile, design, user experience, usability, development and the future of technology.
Josh Clark asked us to leave the confines of the desktop world when thinking about design for mobile devices and touch in his presentation at Breaking Development. As the only native app developer at the conference he asked brought a different perspective to the mobile web centric. Here re my notes:
- Touch should force us rethink the ineraction and get rid of the years of work level debris.
- The web sucks at interaction design.
- Natural gestures will force a change in interaction.
- We need real support for gestures in the browser.
- Be more creative with gestural conventions.
- Create the illusion of directly interacting with the content.
- Allow user to be lazy.
- We access uncontious knowledg faster than conscience.
- Social signifiers only work if you know them.
- Our job is to hive users confidence in knowing what they are doing.
- UI conventions are social conventions.
- Labels help, no labels are better.
- Up front manuals make apps feel more complicated then they need to be rather than making it easy.
- We don’t read manuals because were impatient. Need to think of them as references.
- If you embrace the skit morph you have to follow through.
- Toddlers get natural interactions better than adults. they aren’t corrupted by 30 years of desktop conventions.
- Play more video games is great way to learn interaction gradually and naturally.
- Coach (ie Cut the Roap): Don’t teach everything at once.
- Leveling Up: Coach when introducing a new feature.
- Power ups: Gestures are the keyboard shortcuts to touch interface.
- Explore multitouch gestures currently we have no patterns.
- Multi touch gestures allows up to play apps not just use them.
- How gestures work depends on who is making the call.
- Have fun play explore but always have time to look back and ask does it make sense?
- Go build great stuff.
Breaking Development iOS touch interface interaction design
In the first, of two parts, Stephanie Rieger presented on implementing a responsive solution for the Nokia browser site. A site that had to hundreds for devices. Here are my notes:
- It’s an emerging process.
- Lot of counterproductive behavior we need to unlearn.
- Content first helps.
- Mobile first (as low as you can go).
- Embrace the cascade.
- Use major and minor breakpoints (minor is device specific)
- Major safe separate CSS documents media queries live in here.
- But what about http requests, we have bigger problems.
- 3rd party add ons also add overhead and aren’t mobile friendly you also loose control.
- Choosing break points. There are no perfect break points. (See slide share for document)
- Screen dimensions are one thing the way devices Handel things like fonts ms and so on changes.
- Sometimes things need to get smaller as the size grows to maintain good negative space.
- Screen size does not map to device or browser capabilities .
- 2 layers of adaption: 1 size appropriate 2 actual browser capabilities and feature enhancement.
- The more accurate information you can detect the more intelligently you can adapt.
- Responsive image: serving appropriate image to each device: use both server and client.
- Client only imposed a heavy burden on constrained devices.
- Use contextual intelligence to implement useful enhancement.
- Sometimes adding or removing content based on device can greatly improve the experience.
Workflow:
- Design graphics together.
- Still not flexible enough
- Embrace opportunity.
“Slides:“http://www.slideshare.net/yiibu/pragmatic-responsive-design”
See Also
breaking development mobile responsive web design adaption
Jeremy Keith kicked off Breaking Development conference with his presentation “There is no Mobile Web”. In his talk he address the issue of language and how it can sometimes get in the way and create barriers. We’ve come to a point where we need to drop the semantics and start designing and building for flexibility in order for everyone to access content from any device. Here are my notes from the talk:
- It’s a language thing there is no seperate web for mobile devices.
- The language we use can effect the way we approach things and framing the conversation.
- That phrase can lead us to siloing off what we are thinking/doing.
- Web should be accessible by any device but it’s daunting to design for a view that constantly changes.
- Grids+page give the designer order, contraint, control; But the browser isn’t a known entity.
- There are so many known unknowns (speed, capabilities, size).
- Browser sizes are a concentual hallucination.
- Fixed sizes allowed us to revert to habits of print.
- We should build flexibly since that’s the way the web works.
- John Allsopp’s Dao of Web Design: embrace the flexibility.
- Our tools tend to contribute to the problem of fixed design.
- New devices are disruptive to this thinking.
- Things aren’t as black & white as we like to think, it’s a sliding scale.
- One web is a redundant but we still don’t know the device connecting to it.
- Webkit is the new ie: it’s a capable browser but to many people are developing specifly for it.
- Clarification: RWD isn’t about mobile it’s about being flexible. It’s not really a sustainable solution as well.
- Better to think mobile first enhance for larger screens.
- So think content first: what is the users task?
- We’ve been too concerned with the container we are designing for and just pour content in. canvas in.
- Time to start designing from the content out, a richer canvas.
- The real answer to web and mobile design: it depends.
- Context first is another unknown.
- Let people access your site no matter what device they come from and meet them halfway.
See also
Luke W’s notes.
Jeremy’s slide deck.
mobile development mobile web one web breaking development
If you want to make a fortune, produce a thing like the iPad, make it very light, and preload it with stuff that people over 65 and 70 years old want to see: web addresses, apps, anything you want. Make the buttons absolutely huge and only have a few of them, and put that on the market at 100 quid for people to buy their grandmothers. You would sell millions! My mother is 93, and if there was an app on a machine that she could see properly showing all the houses that have been sold for 100 miles around, she’d be on it night and day…
The founder of Grindr, one of the most successful iOS apps (IMHO) has just launched Blendr, a location-based service to find people with similar interests nearby – think of it as Grindr for straight people. For those of you unfamiliar with Grindr, it’s an app aimed at gay, bi and curious men that uses GPS technology to instantly locate guys in your surrounding area for chatting or meeting up. I think it’s a perfect example of using the mobile medium in the right context to service a particular need.
Blendr uses the same theory and technology, where you setup a profile and can find people with similar interests in your area. It will show you who is online near you, and you can privately instant message other users, check in and update your status. Blendr has stronger privacy controls than Grindr, so you can select who can see your profile – for example you can update your settings so only certain groups, such as “women 25-30” can view your profile. Like Grindr, they mask your location so it’s only a rough estimate of distance from you rather than an exact location. From memory when Grindr first launched they didn’t have this location mask and there were a few anecdotal incidents of hate crimes due to the app.
I’ve always wondered if a “straight version of Grindr” would be anywhere near as successful as Grindr – my theory is no as there are such different interactions between gay and heterosexual hookups. So saying, I can see this app being quite successful, particularly on a boozy Friday or Saturday night.
My favorite part of Blendr is a quote from the founder in the NYT.
“Even if you’re a married man and you only want to meet other married men to play poker, you can set the settings to show those matches,” Mr. Simkhai said.
Ummmmm. I admit I’m not a married man so I can’t say this for certain, but I don’t think married men specifically look for other married men to play poker with. I can think of quite a few other things married men might use this app for, none of which involve looking for other married men.
Not only is there incompatibility among the vendors, but given the lack of any cues on the devices, it is very difficult to remember the gestures. We are back to the days of command-line interfaces where everything had to be memorized, or looked up in a manual. I can only remember the gestures on my Macintosh by launching the “Settings” application, finding the trackpad control panel, and reviewing the four gestures under the tab “Point & Click,” the four gestures under “Scroll & Zoom,” and the six gestures listed under “More Gestures.” What ever happened to Apple’s image of “ease of use?” In the early days, one didn’t even have to read the manual to use a Macintosh. Now I am forced to read the same section of the manual on a regular basis.
The death of the book has been greatly exaggerated, but it’s also great to see innovation as publishers work out how to integrate digital and mobile into their publishing models. Kindle is leading the charge at the moment, with a new “@author” feature just being released. “@author” allows you to highlight any passage in a Kindle book, and use the controller to type in “@author” with a question, which sends the question to both Twitter and Amazon’s author page. Once the author replies, you get an email as well as the answer being available publicly.
Amazon is touting this as a new way for readers to connect with the author, as well as engaging the community around the author’s new books. At the moment there are 16 participating authors, from a mix of fiction, business / instructional writing and self-help.
While I wouldn’t use this feature at the moment (most of my favorite writers are dead, and any question I had for them would be a lot longer than 140 characters) I love that Kindle is constantly looking for new ways to bring writing alive for readers and to connect them with writers. I can see this being of huge value as they add more authors, particularly around more technical books – say for example Brian’s book on Mobile Design and Development.
The Financial Times has just removed its iPad and iPhone apps from Apple’s iTunes App Store after failing to reach an agreement on who owns their customer’s subscription data. Apparently the FT have been in negotiations with Apple for months, and, probably sensing the outcome ahead of them, they released an HTML5 version of their app in July.
The Financial Times is encouraging subscribers to use their mobile web app, which has been getting more traffic than their iOS apps combined, and drives the most subscriptions in their mobile channels.
I’m only surprised as I thought they removed their native iOS apps a few months ago when they launched their HTML5 edition – I guess this has given them time to work through any bugs and kinks in their system. It will be interesting to see who else follows suit – is Apple’s 30% cut and insistence on owning customer subscription data going to be a big enough turn-off to drive publishers to the mobile web?
We started as just two guys in an incubator working on a project, and now we’re six people, and have been handed the opportunity to do something really big in the world. We have a responsibility to see this through, and it’s an amazing ride.
— Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, who also mentions that one of the next big core improvements is providing a web-based experience.
Tokyo resident Steve Tame reacted to the news of Steve Job’s resignation with a little creativity – he used Runkeeper, 2 iPhones and a 21km run to create a tribute to Steve Jobs.
